요이 Yo-E Ryou

Breath Orchestra is an ongoing series of sound, video, and participatory performance works rooted in the orally transmitted knowledge and embodied breathing practices of the Haenyeo, Jeju Island’s elderly women divers. Rather than treating performance as a fixed outcome, the project unfolds through workshops, rehearsals, collective listening, and repeated enactments, where breath is practiced, shared, and learned as a form of living knowledge. These processes function as a form of living archive—one that resists textual documentation alone and instead accumulates through bodies, rhythms, pauses, and relations formed over time.

Across its different Acts, Breath Orchestra experiments with what it means to remember, document, and archive intangible heritage—particularly forms of knowledge that have historically been transmitted through breath, gesture, and proximity rather than written records. Each performance is preceded and shaped by oral instruction, collective rehearsal, and situational listening, allowing participants to temporarily inhabit and transmit breathing techniques without claiming ownership or mastery over them. In this way, the work proposes an alternative archival practice: one that remains incomplete, porous, and continually reactivated through presence, repetition, and care.